Category Archives: diversity

Medicine and Sustainability

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Two important stories that will make sense to all of you, but specifically to those “I wanna be a doctor” folks among us.  As you’ll learn in the California story, doctors get paid by the task — office visit, exam, surgery, etc.  This is not sustainable given where health care may be headed; it’s certainly not beneficial to the consumer.   Also as you’ll hear, given the cost of medical school and the loans MD’s have to pay back after graduation, specialization in the system drives doctors away from where they are indeed needed — primary care.

In California, Facing Down a Family Physician Shortage

In another story that shows us how wonderful we are, this is concerns Global Health.  In fact, this link will take you to several stories concerning Global Health — cholera perhaps spreading to the DR and Miami, organ trafficking, and a global food crisis.

As you ponder your last “mini” essays, think about some of these challenges.

Green School

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Another TED talk. This is John Hardy who has created a Green School in Bali with his wife Cynthia three years ago. The schools is really green–in all senses. The school teaches both traditional “school” subjects as well as green subjects (like growing food). The school is committed to keeping about a fourth of it the student population Balinese as well as making sure the teachers are as well; with that said, from the images and clips in the video it seems as if the school is not that ethnically and racially diverse. This short talk is very interesting and I would encourage everyone to check it out. I have also included a link to their website.

John Hardy TED talk

Green School Website

Best,

Alex

The Harry Potter Alliance

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This, according to the famous Henry Jenkins, media scholar at MIT, could be the way the next wave of activists gets nurtured.  Jenkins calls this “Avatar Activism.”

About 100,000 Harry Potter fans have been mobilized by HPA for causes including marriage equality, genocide prevention and literacy. They raised enough money to send five cargo planes to Haiti bearing medical supplies after the earthquake there, and they’ve bought thousands of books for libraries in Rwanda and the Mississippi Delta.

Harry Potter: Boy Wizard … And Real Life Activist? addresses what may be an evolving phenomenon around activism.   Reading this, I am reminded of Plato’s Republic and how he warned that the poet is a threat to the State. I’m wondering whether this new form of narrating could be a place for storytelling for a new generation?

Understanding Social Determinants of Health

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Understanding the Social Determinants of Health: Breaking the Link between Poverty and Health

Brown graduates working with Project Health (program where college students work in local health clinics) based in Providence, Rhode Island. Samantha Murder (Program Manager) and Hanna Nichols (National Talent and Technology Coordinator)

Cycle of Poverty

  • MONEY is needed for healthy food, healthy housing, childcare (so you can go to work), education and school, clothing (job interviews), health care, utilities, medicine
  • in order to get money you need a JOB
  • in order to have a job, you need EDUCATION

Need education and a good job for money, but need money for education and chance for a job! Not a linear path and a difficult cycle to enter.

Project Health works to provide resources and knowledge.

Social Determinants of Health- “economic and social conditions under which people live which determine their health”

  • The Big Five: Food, housing, energy, education, and employment/insufficient income.
  • Shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources (influenced by policy choices)
  • Social determinants are mostly responsible for health inequities

What do we mean by Poor?

Mentioned that the federal poverty line has been used a lot throughout the symposium as a measure of poverty. They stressed that people are struggling for money well above the federal poverty line. The federal poverty line for a family of 4 is $22,050, but, in suburban Illinois for instance, a family needs at least $58,000 for necessities (study done by NCCP -see budget calculator)

FOOD

Food insecurity greatly increases likelihood for poor health (ex. low birth weight for mothers)

Compared nationally, Vermont is doing well, subsidized lunches and breakfasts at school are critical (50% of kids in Essex county use this) Essex also has high levels of low birth weight.

What’s out there? Resources to combat food insecurity

ENERGY

Heat or eat?

Energy insecure households- 22% increased chance of being hospitalized since birth

What’s out there?

  • LIHEAP (covers a large amount of monthly winter heating bill, if you can’t meet cutoff your utilities will be shut off- difficult to pay back. Grants are getting smaller)
  • local neighborhood funds
  • Special protections for disabilities
  • Payment plans (utilites prefer some money)

HOUSING

Related to health. Household mold (makes you 2.2 times more likely to experience asthma!), cockroaches, cold, lead poisoning, unsafe housing conditions, stress from not being able to pay rent contribute to asthma and low nutrition, hospitalizations, poor health

Housing is considered not affordable when it costs more than 30% of income.

Housing in context- Vermont. Top 10 occupations in Vermont include retail salespeople, cashiers, janitors and cleaners- none of whom have a salary high enough to pay for housing. Not a livable salary! Poverty is “not just about getting a job”

What’s out there

  • public subsidized housing (projects)
  • private subsidized housing (contracted out)
  • housing choice voucher Program (Section 8)- pay up to 30% of income and government pays rest- HARD TO GET, 5 to 8 year wait for voucher in Rhode Island
  • shelters
  • transitional housing
  • rental assistance
  • legal action- something unsafe in house- legal pressure on landlord (less expensive than moving)

EDUCATION

They highly suggested the film “Waiting for Superman”! (check out the trailer)

What’s out there

  • GED classes
  • ESOL classes (English is 2nd language)
  • Adult basic education
  • Computer literacy
  • Child enrichment
  • Head start and early head start (includes literacy classes for parents, checkup for kids, losing seats right now)

INSUFFICIENT INCOME/ EMPLOYMENT

Related to obesity and other health issues. Not knowing what will happen raises stress and sickness- lack of locus of control.

People below the poverty line live an average of 9.6 health adjusted years less than Americans above the poverty line!

What’s out there

  • Child care subsidies
  • Food stamps

PROJECT HEALTH

Founder noticed underlying health problems involved with evictions

Doctors could do nothing for patients suffering from unemployment, poor housing.

Student in project health connect families to resources/volunteers. For example, they often connect families to food pantries or call utilities to arrange payment plans.

HOW THEY WORK

  • guided referrals
  • resource knowledge
  • identification of barriers
  • creative solutions
  • education
  • advocacy
  • connections

Conversations about food security and housing are important to both doctors and patients, but those conversations weren’t happening. Health services often don’t have the time or the knowledge to refer people, which is where Project Health steps in. Project Health also works to collect data that can be used in advocacy movements and campaigns.

Located in 6 cities, with 600 volunteers, and has helped over 5,000 families.

If you’re interested, check them out here!

What Democracy?

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Following our discussion on Thursday, defining terms — Democracy, Socialism, Communism, Capitalism and The Yankees — several parallel stories have appeared that suggest the struggle and the tension we discovered in our exercise, in our discussion.

Please examine these, carefully, and again per group (each group, except one, still is behind and has to do the Scott Page post), determine HOW these stories define Democracy/Capitalims/Us and HOW these stories parallel Empire of Illusion.

The first story is from Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, ” ‘Citizens United’ Ruling Opened Floodgates on Groups’ Ad Spending.”

The next 2 are not stories, but rather, commentaries.  First, Bob Herbert, writing for the New York Times, in Policy at its Worst, tells us that, “We can’t put the population to work, or get the kids through college, or raise the living standards of the middle class and the poor. We can’t rebuild the infrastructure or curb our destructive overreliance on fossil fuels.”

The next opinion, also from the Times, is by  Charles M. Blow, High Cost of Crime.  Here, Blow informs us that, “Our approach to this crime problem for more than two decades has been the mass incarceration of millions of Americans and the industrializing of our criminal justice system. Over the last 25 years, the prison population has quadrupled. This is a race to the bottom and a waste of human capital. A prosperous country cannot remain so by following this path.”  Take a look at how much a single murder costs — then ask yourself: why do we incarcerate more people than anyone else in the industrial world?

The last story, which parallels Hedges’ chapter, “The Illusion of Wisdom,” and written by the indefatigable Camille Paglia, was sent to me by Izzy Ocampo.  In “Revalorizing the Trades,” Paglia asks, “what if a student wants a different, less remunerative or status-oriented but more personally fulfilling career?”  She responds to her question, saying that, “There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks.”

In a moment, Paglia sounds a lot like Hedges:

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense. The humanities have been gutted by four decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and insular identity politics. They bear little relationship to the liberal arts of broad perspective and profound erudition that I was lucky enough to experience in college in the 1960s.

Examine each of the stories and the editorials, then discuss, online, how all this fits our notion of the struggle for democracy, our struggle for the truth?

Scott Page on Leveraging Diversity

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As you find definitions for Democracy, Socialism, Capitalism and Communism, you will undoubtedly confront the notion of diversity — what is it, why is it important, how do ensure diversity since it’s apparently important for human evolution.

In all, as you define the above terms, you will be examining the characteristics of our society, particularly as we discuss Ecological Democracy.  Diversity shows up here, again.

Scott E. Page, who came to Midd last year, wrote The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. (Read some of the book here)

I suggest that you find the time, either alone or in groups, to check out Scott’s lecture at the University of Virginia and follow his logic.  Regardless of what endeavor you choose in the future, thinking about how diversity works — and can work — will be extraordinarily useful. Of course, thinking about how we might be able to enable diversity to evolve in a healthy manner with Democracy — or whatever else we come up with as we contemplate our world — is extraordinarily important.

The Lecture: Leveraging Diversity

After watching the lecture, if, by group say, each group synthesizes and summarizes what you hear and then point to what you find important will be very useful; then if each person of each group adds and comments on what others are summarizing and saying, this will be useful too — and perhaps a model of what Page is talking about.